Ten years before, as a boy of seventeen, he had taken the same walk with Fausta. What ten years had done we read in these verses; and the many changes and wanderings of his soul during this decade of life are well represented by the windings in the poem of various thoughts within the unity of its main thought. The lines I quoted are full of the soul of Arnold at twenty-seven. Their quiet, self-controlled, and solitary note, with their love of peace and obedience, and of union not with quarrelsome particulars but with the still movement of the general life to an ordered and luminous end, is no unfitting close to the struggle I have endeavoured to describe. "Blame not," he cries, "Fausta, the man who has seen into life, and who has attained tranquillity, but for thyself"—
Nobler than this, to fill the day;
Rather that heart, which burns in thee,
Ask, not to amuse, but to set free;
Be passionate hopes not ill resign'd
For quiet, and a fearless mind.
And though fate grudge to thee and me
The poet's rapt security,
Yet they, believe me, who await
No gifts from chance, have conquer'd fate.
They, winning room to see and hear,
And to men's business not too near,
Through clouds of individual strife
Draw homeward to the general life.
Like leaves by suns not yet uncurl'd;
To the wise, foolish; to the world,
Weak;—yet not weak, I might reply,
Not foolish, Fausta, in His eye,
